Building Guitar cabs

[gazariff]

This might be strange one, but it's going out there anyway.
My guitarist and I have thought about building our own cabs.
Now I've looked at some Mongotone cabs, these are made from solid tone woods rather than the ply board most cabs are made of.
Has anyone any info or experience of solid cabs. My mate is up for the ply wood, this seems counter intuative to me. Well made guitars are made of solid woods, not ply, so why not cabs.
He points out resonance as a problem, I think so long as the sides are tuned to a pitch (same idea as an acoustic guitar) and I'd go with a circle of 5ths for the tuning of each panel. C, G for the sides, D, A for the top and bottom, E, B for the front and back panel. These are just an idea for the tuning of them.

[Madsakre]

I got an oversized mesa rectifier 4x12. Its made from solid birch. It sounds... better than all other cabs i've ever tried! period

[Frank]

Yes, solid birch or pine cabs sound a lot better than ply BUT there's a lot more to cabinet design than that. Entire books have been written on the subject, complex formulae concerning resonant peaks of the loudspeaker(s), volume, phase, impedance ... you could just throw everything in a sealed box and it might sound good but I'm not convinced you want the cabinet itself to resonate at all. Mechanical resonance means vibration - and that means the cab is absorbing the acoustic energy and converting it into mechanical movement. You don't gain any volume by having a piece of wood absorbing sound energy. You'll probably just get a cab that rattles.

[bandmaster188]

i built a solid pine 4x10 cab a few years ago and i can definately say that pine resonates alot better than your standard birch ply cab. i went to town on it a bit and dovetailed the corners, (just cause i could) not for any tonal reasons.
loaded it with jensen p10r's and voila, great sounding open back cab. i was using a matamp 4x12 which i sold as soon as i finished the pine cab. i would'nt claim to be any kind of expert on this as i've only built the one cab. but it does sound better than anything i've plugged into so far.

[d1dsj]

Yep I had a Mongotone cab, the 4 x 10 that was reviewed in Guitarist magazine to be exact. Unfortuantely I hit hard times and had to sell some gear including some cabs. I had to decide between my Cornford RK 4 x 12 or the Mongotone and I regretfully sold the Mongotone. Both sounded great but my amp was a Cornford and so the RK paired up with it visually and being pine construction sounded nice, more presence than your birch ply cab. However, I found the Mongotone had a real quality of sound that none of the other cabs had... wish I still had it. I will contact Marc in the future and have another one built. I do now believe that a solid "real" wood cab can add some presence, bounce and projection to your sound and that's ok if you are playing without too much gain and don't need a really tight, bottom ended sound. If you do then I'd go for a birch ply construction which will dampen/ deaden the sound for a thicker sound.

[tomjackson]

Solid wood cabs are usually uncovered wheras ply cabs are usually covered in tolex.
There's a good chance that is as much of a factor.

Somebody pull the tolex off their ply cab and report your findings!

[d1dsj]

I had an old Orange cab that was bare for a while and I didn't notice too much difference with the covered one I had. There's a fair bit of glue in ply wood and I would think it is going to have an effect on the sound you get.

[tomjackson]

Yeah but glue sounds amazing!

[d1dsj]

 :lol: